The Footprint Blog

Last week I was justly called out for passing along some dubious holiday energy statistics, so this week I’m going to play it safe with some figures I’m sure are correct: did you know that every year, Americans buy six hundred trillion trillion miles of Christmas lights, enough to stretch to the outer limits of the known universe and back eighteen times?

All those lights suck a lot of power — in fact, total power consumption from Christmas lights is five times the entire energy output of the sun since the beginning of time. Fortunately, NASA scientists are on the case, bringing us innovations such as the solar-powered LED Christmas light.

Not only will these babies cut down your carbon emissions and energy bills, they’ll also save you the trouble of finding an outdoor outlet. Best of all, you don’t even have to bother switching them on. They activate automatically at dusk.

For those TerraBlog readers who celebrate the Festival of Lights, recall that Hanukkah is the original energy efficiency holiday — eight days of illumination from a single day’s worth of oil. And now you can celebrate that miracle with this incredibly tacky LED Super Mensch novelty menorah, which, as an added bonus, plays Rock of Ages. Hu chag tov!